Independent Study Week 4: The Wire

Despite the remaining two weeks of independent study, it really feels like things are happening quickly. I started another character this week. It's coming along, but I'm still embarrassed by how it's looking, so you don't see it yet. Here's progress on the demon guy;

Kaitlin tells me his toes look like Cheetos. I feel like compared to the rest of him, his legs are lacking something. I can't decide if I want to do shoes or armor on his thighs. That will probably be decided this week, in addition to building him a war hammer. I also aim to have the other character in a presentable state.

I got together with some art friends yesterday and it was a really good time. We had great discussions about work and drawing and it really got me pumped. I drew some stuff in my sketchbook I didn't hate. Is the slump coming to an end? I certainly hope so.

Here's a thing I'd like to finish. Behold the Psychic King, a giant alien entity from beyond the edge of space hell-bent on enslaving humanity. We find our hero at the apex of his rocket jump, the climax of this duel: When he presses a button, his blade's turbine spools up and the boosterblade carves in twain all matter unfortunate enough to stand in its way. Wind whistling through his ears, he knows there's only chance to strike the vulnerable brain of his foe before losing his mind to the crushing mental influence of the King. He prays his timing is correct and pulls the trigger.

This next one is an edit by me. I drew it with a pen in my sketchbook as seen above, but I moved the jumper for the sake of the design. I'll probably go with this instead.

The rest of my sketchbook from yesterday:

There you go. I'm gonna do some cool stuff this week! Wish me luck.

Progress on the Cutie

Progress on the work in progress. I hope to have him armed for the next update, and maybe textured. That would be excellent!

I did a one-hour study from this collection of photographs. I wish I had the line work, because I felt it was much more spot on, but apparently I closed the document without saving, so this is all you get.

Finally, I have some sketchbook stuff I didn't hate from this week. I've noticed that I have to slog through about an hour of warmup nonsense before I start doing stuff I like. I need to make the time to squeeze in more sketchbook, since I'm not going to finish this one by tomorrow. I'm not even halfway there!

Until next time.

Studies from Figure Drawing

Hi. Today (Now yesterday) Kaitlin and I are going to a friend's wedding, so I took the day off. She'll be here to pick me up any minute, but I spent the morning scanning in some of the images from my figure drawing class. Honestly, I was a bit disappointed as I flipped through these. I remember doing some really killer stuff, but most of these weren't at all impressive.

Truthfully, I was also tired of scanning 5 images in the big (but not big enough) scanner here at school and then stitching them together. There's a few really nice gesture drawings I didn't upload and a couple other charcoal studies I didn't want to deal with. But whatever.

This was the final project. I did a pretty initial drawing and, in typical Zach fashion, ruined it when I tried to render it out. Probably my biggest frustration was the mess I made of her hand. I managed to salvage it to what you see here in the last 15 minutes, but this could have been the best drawing of my life. Maybe next time.

I love the poses with the chair. I noticed many of my classmates neglecting to use it, but it provides such a great measuring tool for getting things proportioned correctly.

For this last one, Perry had the model wear black articles of clothing and our job was to just draw them as though they were solid shapes. It was a fun exercise!

That's all I have for today. My sketchbook is still struggling, but my demon-building is going well. Expect more of that soonish!

Also? We didn't have a single male model all summer. Hopefully future figured classes amend this.

Dark Times: Slump City

It's been a busy couple weeks. I scanned probably 8 sketchbook pages for upload, but when I opened everything up to prepare them, they were't really good enough to put here. I'm just under halfway through my current sketchbook. I won't finish by the 18th (or 17th, I can't remember when I hit the month mark). So far, it's a bit of an embarrassment in there! I've been slumping pretty seriously in that department. I really want to push myself out of this soon.

In other news, independent study is going fine. Today marks the beginning of the 3rd week. The first week I spent working on a previously mentioned project for a client. Last week I finished the basic sculpt for my first character. This week I want to do a detail pass and extrude clothes and armor. It would be ideal to finish this guy so I could do a couple more, but this is going slower than I anticipated. Hopefully things pick up! Expect more of this guy soon, as well as stuff from the figure drawing class from first block.

Oh, as a sidenote, I'm using a great tutorial from Kurt Papstein's Gumroad. Check him out here. He's great!